BoomTown Decodes Carl Icahn's Letter to Yahoo! — BoomTown's most favorite part of the Yahoo takeover circus? — The dueling letters, of course! How the lovely practice of missives has fallen out of favor, as soulless emails have grown in use. — Well, not in the land of hostile takeovers!

Thoughts on Privacy — As developers, you're probably curious about the recent initiatives we and other companies in the industry have taken to help you build applications that let users take their information around the web. We wanted to give you a little more information on how we're thinking …

Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children — After a years-long dispute, Microsoft and the computing and education project One Laptop Per Child said Thursday that they had reached an agreement to offer Windows on the organization's computers. — Microsoft long resisted joining …

Microsoft, OLPC officially team up — So, I guess this makes it Two Operating Systems Per Child. — The One Laptop Per Child project and Microsoft announced on Thursday that, indeed the XO laptop will be available in both Linux and Windows varieties. The companies plan to sell …

Comcast Lied to FCC, Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24/7 — BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. Up until today however, there has been no reliable data that revealed the scope of it.

Google Translate adds 10 new languages... ...and that's great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within Google Research, I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge.

‘GTA’ what? Nintendo still rules console market — As the video-game industry prepares to see the impact of “Grand Theft Auto IV” on Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's “GTA"-less Wii console keeps chugging along. The company just announced that NPD Group data …

Are social networks dragging down CPMs? — My pal Mark Dempster over at Sequoia sent me a study on CPM's dropping. — The key finding here, in my mind, is what I've said all along: social networks are great for traffic but horrible for advertising. Social networking sites are probably …

Twitter Traffic Explosion: Who's behind it all? — Twitter has made headlines for some amazingly powerful stuff lately; breaking the news of recent China's earthquake; partnering with MySpace for it's “data availability” project; even helping a student get out of jail!

Microsoft cuts backup from Windows Home Server PowerPack — Microsoft won't be delivering database backup as one of the new features promised for the first “PowerPack” update for Windows Home Server when it ships later this year. — The independent “We Got Served” Home Server blog acknowledged the feature cut in a May 9 entry.

The Monkey is Out and the Challenge is On — It's been three weeks since we began the limited preview of Yahoo! Search's new open developer platform, SearchMonkey. Today, we're officially opening up the doors to all developers — professionals and hobbyists — to begin building applications …